[Haskell-cafe] where to put general-purpose utility functions

[John Goerzen]

Hi Joey,

Apologies for such a late reply.  I don't know if others have replied on 
-cafe; it has become too high-volume for me to follow of late.  There 
are several options.  MissingH is one.  I have accepted patches there 
for a long time.  Another is that now that Hackage/Cabal foster easy 
inclusion of small packages, you might want to roll your own.  
(Occasionally I have hesitation about drive-by commits to MissingH 
because I get asked to support the code later at times.)

-- John

On 01/21/2012 02:20 PM, Joey Hess wrote:
> I'm finding a rather unusual problem as I write haskell..
>
> Unlike every other language I've used, large portions of my haskell code
> are turning out to be general-purpose, reusable code. Fully 20% of the
> haskell code I've written for git-annex is general purpose. Now, I came out
> of a decade of perl with maybe 1% reusable code. So I'm sure this is a
> credit to haskell, and not to me.
>
> My problem now is that as I start new projects, I want to have my haskell
> utility functions available, and copying them around is not ideal. So, put
> them on hackage. But where, exactly? It already has several grab bag utility
> libraries. The only one with much traction is MissingH. Using the others
> makes a program have an unusual dependency, which while only a cabal
> install away, would make work for distributions that want to package the
> program. I've ruled out using a couple on that basis. Doesn't encourage me
> to add another one.
>
> My 2000+ lines of reusable code are a grab-bag of generic utility
> functions. Looking them over (see Appendix), I could try to get portions
> into existing libraries on hackage, but it's unlikely I'd find a home
> for most of them, so I'm still left with this problem of what to do.
>
> I wonder if the model used for xmonad-contrib, of a big library package,
> that is very open to additions from contributors, would be helpful here?
>
> John, any interest in moving MissingH in this direction? I get the
> impression it's not otherwise changing much lately, and parts of it are
> becoming naturally obsolete, maybe this could inject some life into it.
> Any other thoughts you have on grab-bag utility libraries on hackage
> also appreciated.
>
> ----
>
> Appendix: A sample of a a few of the better functions from my utility library.
>
>    Some quite generic monadic control functions, few of them truely unique:
>
>    whenM :: Monad m =>  m Bool ->  m () ->  m ()   -- also>>?
>    unlessM :: Monad m =>  m Bool ->  m () ->  m () -- also>>!
>    firstM :: Monad m =>  (a ->  m Bool) ->  [a] ->  m (Maybe a)
>
>    A module that exports functions conflicting with partial
>    functions in the Prelude, to avoid them being accidentially
>    used. And provides some alternatives (which overlap somewhat with Safe):
>
>    headMaybe :: [a] ->  Maybe a
>    readMaybe :: Read a =>  String ->  Maybe a
>    beginning :: [a] ->  [a]
>
>    Various path manipulation functions such as:
>
>    dirContains :: FilePath ->  FilePath ->  Bool
>    dotfile :: FilePath ->  Bool
>    absPath :: FilePath ->  IO FilePath
>
>    Other stuff:
>
>    separate :: (a ->  Bool) ->  [a] ->  ([a], [a])
>    catchMaybeIO :: IO a ->  IO (Maybe a)
>    readSize :: [Unit] ->  String ->  Maybe ByteSize -- parses "100 kb" etc
>    format :: Format ->  Variables ->  String
>    findPubKeys :: String ->  IO GpgKeyIds
>    boolSystem :: FilePath ->  [CommandParam] ->  IO Bool
>    withTempFile :: Template ->  (FilePath ->  Handle ->  IO a) ->  IO a
>